Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Examining how Professional Academic Organizations engage with Wikimedia (ID: 22214495)
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Applicant Details edit
- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
BrettButtliere
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal edit
- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Examining how Professional Academic Organizations engage with Wikimedia
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2023-09-01 - 2024-07-01
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
Poland
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Other (please specify) While we are not formally affiliated, WikiVersity, WikiJournals, and many of the Wikimedia and Education and more discipline-related activities are related and will benefit from this research.
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
The main change we are trying to bring about is the adoption of Wikimedia projects as knowledge sharing platforms for scientists and professional academic organizations more generally. Using Wikipedia as a knowledge base is reasonable because it is where people go for knowledge, and especially with Scientists increasingly calling for openness, there are few better places than Wikimedia, which has such a strong open first policy, is publicly trusted, and can handle e.g., data and discussion. We estimate opportunities to save society billions of dollars each year. Despite these facts, few professional academics are editors, and there are few institutional initiatives to encourage the use of Wikipedia among professional organizations. Even when these initiatives exist, they are rarely more than one off ‘edit-a-thons’, sometimes repeated, but there is a general feeling in the discussions we’ve had so far that there is the opportunity to do more. The goal of this rapid grant is a systematic examination of what is being done by professional academic associations and how it can be brought to the next level. This will consist of a 1) a systematic search of professional organization’s activities, the development of a participant invite list of people who have previously engaged, and the development of a survey to see how we can support these individuals and determine a strategic plan of action moving forward. A perfect example of the types of individuals we will aim to identify, survey and support is Prof. Mahzarin Banaji, who is the ex president of the Association for Psychological Science, now at Harvard, who wrote a series of blog posts (in 2011) about how the APS should be using Wikipedia to communicate to the public. Unfortunately, she stopped working on the project in about 2014 after her presidency ended, and there was a precipitous drop in activity surrounding this initiative once the champion had kind of disengaged;the most recent podcast on the website about Wikipedia or media is from 2016. Our goal is to find out how we can best create a professional network to support people like this and to encourage the adoption of Wikimedia projects at these organizations. Systematic research will involve examining 100 large American academic associations and 100 international organizations as identified on e.g., the Wikipedia “List of higher education associations and organizations in the United States”, and the “Global Wikipedia List of higher education associations and alliances” as well as Wikipedia’s category of Academic Organizations more generally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Scientific_organizations). In each instance, we expect to search the organization’s website for mentions of Wikipedia and Wikimedia initiatives, to record what activities have been done, and especially to focus on identifying particular champions in these organizations. For each activity, we will log its type (e.g., edit-a-thon, editor training), who ran it, and we will focus on locating an email for these people. Given that many academic organizations have held multiple activities, we will focus on the newest, the oldest, and up to 10 others, focusing on identifying different champion individuals and logging their activity. A central part of this work is to identify and contact these champions in order to further engage them in more sustainable Wikimedia activities and build a professional consortium. To do this, we aim to hire two student scientists, through summer stipends, to systematically search professional websites and identify contact points for any initiatives we find. These activities will also be categorized, such that we have a good idea of what initiatives are going on, and in what areas of science. One major goal of this activity will also be to develop an email list of initiative champions to send the survey we develop. We expect to survey 100+ people, and to invite them to, e.g., a Slack channel for further development. Long term the goal will be to author a white paper or journal article that serves as a call to action for engaging professional organizations in Wikipedia and develop joint actions together for the initiative. These activities match well the movement strategy, especially Coordinating across stakeholders, Investing in Skills and Leadership Development, and Identifying Topics for Impact. A major focus of our work is Coordinating across stakeholders, and especially in this activity identifying the stakeholders that we want to coordinate. In the medium term it is a Skills and Leadership Development Project, and in the longest term it is an Impactful Topics project. In the long term we hope to make Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects the standard knowledgebase for science. Having topic articles reflect the latest academic understanding means that the knowledge is public from the start, and downstream positives can be achieved. For instance, Wikipedia articles can be collected and provided to students as OERs. College students alone spend approximately 10 billion a year on textbooks, even with 1% of this per year (i.e., 100 million) Wikipedia can do long-term excellent things.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
The two major goals of the activities are to create a dataset and understanding about what exactly academic associations are doing (if anything) related to Wikimedia projects, and more importantly, curate a current email list of champions and organizers among these organizations. Longer term, we will aim to activate these people for instance to create an interorganizational work group, standards, and interdisciplinary initiatives. The curation of the list of initiatives and contact points will proceed by identifying lists of professional organizations, going to the websites of those organizations, and searching for Wikipedia on them. Searching the website of the Association for Psychological Science for Wikipedia identifies 145 blog posts mentioning it, but mostly occurring before 2014. When there are more than 10 activities on the webpage, we will randomly select 10, focusing on different types of activities, and especially the ones at the beginning and end of the activities. The student scientists will be expected to identify the main content of the activity, a brief description of the activity, when it occurred, links related to the activity, as well as a contact point for the individual who hosted or e.g., wrote about it. The first major outcome of this activity will be a dataset of these activities and the academic organizations that did them. Having this data will already be useful in estimating how we can best move this field forward, both as an idea of what is being done and to establish connection points with people in this area. The understanding surrounding this list of activities is expected to form the basis of a position paper wherein we call for academic organizations to engage more fully with Wikimedia, outlining best practices, and highlighting ways to continue the engagement. The hope is that we can engage some of the champions we identify through this action to engage their organizations also in signing and activating their networks. Aside from this list of activities, we expect to create a database and email list of champions that we will aim to engage in future projects. One of our first projects after this activity will be to create a survey that we will distribute among the individuals we identify here. A major part of the project is the survey that we expect to develop for distribution among this list of champions that we identified through this activity. A draft of the survey has been developed and we are open to any feedback or ideas. Our goal will be to keep it in the 4-5 minute range, though it will ask the user for links to e.g.,to their work, and in general ask them some open-ended questions, so it can take longer depending on how much effort the participant puts in. We are currently expecting to ask them about their organization and the activity it engages in, their role in the organization, what they would like to see happen, how they would like to be supported by us, and finally to provide additional contacts of interested individuals At the end of the survey, we intend to give the participant more ways to get involved e.g., a Slack channel and potentially a Wikipedia user group or Wikiproject that we will create. If we can bring together a team of 10 professional organizations it would be a great start. Timeline: Grant made: August 15th, 2023 Students hired: October 1st, 2023 Data collection finished: December 1st, 2023 Data analyzed: March 1st, 2024 Summary paper submitted: June 1st, 2024 Survey sent: June 15tth, 2024
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
Brett Buttliere, dr., (username: BrettButtliere) is a researcher based at the University of Warsaw, Poland, who has been working on digital infrastructure for science during the last years. He has surveyed thousands of scientists on open science, replications, and how they think science can be improved generally. His recent works on the history of science on Wikipedia have been presented at the ‘Big Data and the History and Philosophy of Science Conference’ of the Scientonomy Society, and are under review at Scientometrics. Dr. Buttliere will be responsible for supervising the work concerning the international academic organizations, as well as reporting for this grant. Matt Vetter (user:Matthewvetter), dr., is a professor based at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing, rhetoric, and is well known in the Wikipedia community for his research on Wikipedia-based education and experience teaching with the Wiki Ed Foundationt. He has served on the regional grants committee for US and Canada since 2021 and was instrumental in organizing the Wikimedia + Libraries International Convention in 2022. He will be responsible for gaining ethical approval and data management of this project. Karolina Cwiekala, MA, is a student scientist in the Science of Science Lab at the University of Warsaw, a linguist, and a vice president of grantmaking at SpokoPolish. She will be responsible for assisting in the collection of data about the professional organizations and will be supervised by Dr. Buttliere. Oksana Moroz, M.A. is a doctoral student in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She will be responsible for assisting in the collection of data about the professional organizations and will be supervised by Dr. Vetter While we feel our team has a requisite skills, we also recognize that the Wikipedia community is truly massive, and nearly every day we are learning about new initiatives, areas, and etc. WikiJournals is an excellent example that we learned of a few days ago. Bringing together these passionate and amazing community leaders will be the major goal of the project.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
In the long term we will be engaging academic organizations, and this project is about identifying those individuals that can potentially represent their academic organizations, since they have already engaged and managed some activity concerning Wikimedia for the Organization. The major goal of the project is to identify these individuals by searching on the professional organization’s websites for wikipedia and wikimedia project related posts.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
We have spoken with several individuals who have engaged with Wikimedia organizations. We sent an email to the Wikimedia and Education listserv (education@lists.wikimedia.org) and received many responses. In particular we spoke with Kirsty Ross, at St Andrews University. We also spoke with Jami Mathewson of the Wiki Education Foundation, and have been in contact with Chris Schilling, Senior Program Officer at WMF. As a result of communicating with individuals on the listserv, we have also crowd-sourced an initial draft of our dataset of professional organizations.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Other Important Topics (topics considered to be of impact or important in the specific context)
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Education
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Coordinate Across Stakeholders
Learning and metrics edit
- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
The project is aimed at creating a database not only of activities but the organizers of those activities. The information in this database will give us a good idea of Wikimedia engagement by professional organizations, but hopefully also some ideas about how these activities can be taken to the next level. Specifically, the idea is to focus on identifying the people within these organizations who can be surveyed, activated, and usefully brought together to bring about the further adoption of and engagement with Wikimedia projects by professional organizations. The core learning questions include:
- 1. What activities have academic professional organizations implemented?
- 2. How can these activities be amplified and taken to the next level?
- 3. Who are the people that manage these activities within the organizations?
These questions will be answered with a systematic search of professional organization’s websites, looking for the keywords “Wikipedia” and “Wikimedia.” Our team will collect activity level and organization level data concerning what activities are done and how often they have been done. Activities will be logged with links and a categorization schema, and the name of the organization and how many blog posts relate to the keywords will be logged. Additionally, we expect to collect champion level data, that is data about those people who are organizing activities for the organization. Here we expect to log the type of activity and the email address of the individual who organized the activity. These data can be expected to form the basis of a paper on the engagement of professional organizations with Wikipedia, and in the longer term a survey and the engagement of the champions that we find.
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 200 | Our goal is to examine 200 professional academic organization websites and gain an understanding of how many have hosted an event, what events they are, and who led them. Thus we have 200 'participating' organizations. From this we hope to explore what activities are done and to identify the emails of those that have organized them. |
| Number of editors | 0 | |
| Number of organizers | 4 | The two supervisors have written the proposal, and will analyze the data that the two research assistants collect. |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies |
- Optional description for content contributions.
Our project is not about adding to Wikipedia directory.
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
Yes
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Activities identified | We will search 200 academic association’s websites, but we are unsure of how many activities we will identify and be able to categorize. We expect to find that some large organizations have dozens or hundreds of activities, and while we will log the number of activities, we will cap our activities at 10. Thus we can expect to log up to 2,000 activities. | 100 |
| Champions and Emails identified: | Associated with each activity, we hope to identify the organizer of the activity, and their email, whom we hope to engage and organize in further actions. We would like to identify one unique person per organization, but also recognize that certain individuals are especially likely to host multiple events, and we hope that the data can also point us in particularly passionate people whom we might support in the future. | 50 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
We are creating a dataset, a csv file, and so this will be the main metric of how successful and useful our efforts are. At minimum we will have records that we searched, and even if we find that only e.g., 20% of the organizations have done anything, this is still even a very interesting result that can be used. Longer term, we aim to invite these champions to take part in a small survey on what they want and need, and in the longer term invite them and others to a conference aimed at generating enthusiasm among professional organizations for the Wikimedia movement.
Financial proposal edit
- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BfsSuvKeB-rr4BB6JGoa-4PV6tZn4ImUYqeI_WYZ3mY/edit#gid=0
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
20000 PLN
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
4892 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback edit
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- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).